I find this kind of usage frightening. I honestly think that a message history of longer than a week encourages poor organisation to such a degree that daily operation is significantly and silently hampered.
Do you have suggestions for process or tooling that allows you to quickly / cheaply take the information or insights that arise from conversation and integrate them into a longer term store? And how to make that longer term location really useful?
To the degree that teams fall into the habit of just searching slack history for info, I think those are the two key factors:
- we remember bits of conversation, and who said something, or in which channel, can be a good way to rediscover the full details; note-taking and aggregating stuff into a knowledge base or docs repository can strip out that info making it harder to rediscover. (The obvious caveat here is that there can be sharp difference between re-finding a conversation you participated in e.g. in your team, vs finding information about a system you depend on from a conversation you didn't participate in.)
- the process of getting stuff shared in slack into a longer-term knowledge base can be slow and tedious, and may require someone to spend time deciding which pieces are potentially valuable, generalizing from the specific case discussed to a form that makes sense out of context, condensing what was said over many messages, arbitrating between views which are valuable but conflicting, etc.
I would like to see an NLP tool for summarizing threads and extracting the information which is most likely to be reusable.
I find searching chat history much more useful than what people used to do, which is throw anything that might be important into a wiki that never gets updated. At least in Slack you get some context around a piece of information rather than a hasty summary.
We implemented a 90 day retention policy for all slack messages about a year ago. Everyone was pretty resistant to it at first, but it's been pretty great, honestly. It forces us to put things we'll want to remember in the handbook and encourages a more async culture. Personally I'd be happy with a 30 day retention policy!
